Friday, February 15, 2013

I've had a revelation!

I know it's a drag to hear people talk about their food intake, but hey, that's all I have today.

The way Cliff and I try to stay on track with our eating habits (notice how I carefully avoid the word "diet") is by counting calories. Cliff doesn't count them, I count for both of us. No food is off-limits, but I try to keep the calories in check most of the time by using portion control and limiting how often we eat out. Most days we each take in from 1,600 to 1,800 calories; this assures that we're seldom hungry. It also assures that we don't lose weight very fast, but then we aren't running a race.

Cliff loves pancakes, and because he tends to over-indulge, we don't have them often. This morning I decided to treat him. Because I'm using Sparkpeople.com to track calories, I typed the recipe into that site to see how many calories I would be eating. Forget about Cliff, he'll be over-indulging anyway. We usually have two pretty big pancakes apiece, even though I'm not that crazy about pancakes. Then there's the butter and syrup, which I decided to measure today, just to keep me honest.

I told Cliff, "I think I'll just have one pancake this time. That's probably plenty."

No response from Cliff.

Ignore the vitamin pills; I add those to track my nutrition intake, not the calories. Thanks to Sparkpeople, I found out my diet was woefully lacking in calcium, and bought myself some pills. Oh, and the Coffeemate amount is for my whole day's coffee intake, not just breakfast, just so I don't have to add it again at dinner.

By sticking to one pancake and not drowning it in syrup, my breakfast calories are pretty close to where they should be. Now I am asking myself, "Would I miss that butter if I left it off? Do I even TASTE the butter when I'm eating my pancake?"

I'm not so sure I do.

So I told Cliff all of this, and he said, "Next time we have pancakes, make just one for me, too."

"Really? Well, if you only have one, you could eat pancakes once a week!"